Grieving Time: the Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media

Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media Anna Cohen Senior Honors Thesis The Department of American Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill May 5, 2021 Approved: ____________________________________ Patricia Sawin (Thesis Advisor) Department of American Studies ____________________________________ Antonia Randolph Department of American Studies ____________________________________ Grabrielle Berlinger Department of American Studies ii Abstract Anna M. Cohen: Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media (Under the Direction of Dr. Patricia Sawin) This thesis engages with Jack Santino’s research on physical shrines and Kay Turner’s “September 11: The Burden of the Ephemeral” as well as other theories surrounding systemic racism and marginalization. Grieving Time: The Formation of Virtual Shrines on Social Media seeks to analyze the different pieces of virtual shrines on social media and their uses in the broader folkloric studies of ritual, decentralized healing, and collective trauma. More specifically, this thesis aims to explain postings on Twitter to create an assemblage that address grief after instances of racialized violence. This thesis will also address Kay Turner’s argument about the role of physical shrines and how they guide those left behind after a sudden unexpected death to a stage of acceptance. I am arguing that due to the nature of systemic racism having no clear end on its stronghold in American society, virtual shrines on social media’s role is to help maintain a constant state of grief rather than deliver those left behind after a racial killing to a stage of acceptance. iii Introduction Figure 1: A Tweet by User @Jaden responding to the protests after the murder of George Floyd. Public Memorials: What They Are and Where to Find Them On March 13, 2020, a group of Louisville, Kentucky law enforcement officers entered Breonna Taylor’s home using a “no-knock” warrant. The police officers thought Taylor had been receiving packages containing drugs on behalf of her ex-boyfriend and therefore went to search her home. As the police officers entered the apartment, Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s then boyfriend, shot a legal firearm at the cops thinking they were intruders breaking into the apartment. This caused cops to return fire, with five bullets hitting and killing Breonna Taylor a few short months before her 27th birthday. The officers, including Brett Hankinson, Detective Myles Cosgrove, and Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, left Taylor’s apartment without finding any drugs on the premises (Oppel Jr, Taylor, Bogel-Burroughs, 2020). Two months after the killing of Breonna Taylor, police officers responded to a report that George Floyd had attempted to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store in Minneapolis. Though the convenience store employee felt sure that Floyd did not know the bill was counterfeit, the cops still took an aggressive approach while arresting Floyd (Chappell, 2021). iv Though the exact time length of time is under dispute, video recordings shared on social media depict officer Derek Chauvin putting his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes during his arrest. Floyd consequently died due to what many critics call Chauvin’s excessive use of force while attempting to restrain him (Hill, Tiefenthäler, Triebert, et al., 2020). Taylor and Floyd’s deaths represent a broader trend of police brutality against black people in the United States. White people who commit violent crimes are more likely to be taken into police custody alive than black people who commit minor offences. For instance, on June 15, 2015 white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black churchgoers as they attended a church service at Mother Emmanuel AME Church. The cops who arrested Roof took the utmost care despite his violently killing nine black people less than a day earlier and even reportedly took him to Burger King before taking him to jail (Staff Reports, 2015). A Twitter post by @JRD_FTW99 pointed out the double standard that a white mass shooter was treated with dignity and respect, while Figure 2: A Twitter thread discussing the George Floyd was killed after an altercation over a double standard in treatment during George Floyd and Dylann Roof's arrests. fake $20 bill (@JRD_FTW99, 2020). I argue that responses like @JRD_FTW99’s, and many other postings on Twitter that grieved the deaths of v Breonna Taylor and George Floyd created virtual shrines that both brought limited comfort to those appalled by their treatment by police and criticized the system of white supremacy that led to their deaths.1 Current scholarship surrounding public shrines mostly considers these memorials as physical enactments of grief. Much of the research on public memorials depicts them as being physical shrines that the public can create using different types of ephemeral objects such as flowers, candles, posters, stuffed animals, and food. Many of the shrines with which the current literature engages were located at the sites of the unexpected deaths they sought to address. Due to the emergence of social media, however, the performance of grief can now also manifest itself in a virtual realm. In this thesis I seek to add more nuance to the arguments on what a shrine is and is not by analyzing the creation of spontaneous shrines through the social media platform Twitter in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police in 2020.Twitter is a social media platform that was formed by current CEO Jack Dorsey as well as Evan Williams, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone on March 21, 2006. In a 2019 study reviewing Twitter’s demographics of users within the United States, about 50% of users were male and 50% were female. Most of Twitter’s users were between the ages of 30-49, with the 18-29 and 50-64 age groups trailing close behind. Finally, the study also calculated that about 10% of the most popular Twitter accounts created 80% of the content circulated among adult Twitter users in the United States (Wojcik, Hughes, 2020) 1 I like many others around the world found myself glued to social media after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. While I did not regularly post on social media during this time. I did, however, spend a lot of time reading other people’s posts about systemic racism and police brutality. I also learned about the ways I could use my privileges as a nonblack person to help create a safer country for people of color from social media and incorporated these into my daily interactions with my friends, family members, and colleagues. It is this knowledge that I gained through hours of being an active observer on social media immediately after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, that I use in my analysis of virtual shrines. vi These statistics are important to acknowledge because they reflect who is actively participating in shrine making on social media. Since memorials heavily reflect the people that make them, it is important to know which demographics are the most active on Twitter. For instance, the study also mentioned that that about 60% of Twitter’s users were white, 11% black, and 17% were Hispanic or Latino of any race, which means that black people and Latinos are represented on Twitter in rough proportion to their percentages of the United States population— 13.4% and 18.5%, respectively—while whites are underrepresented relative to their 76.3% of the population (US Census Quick Facts, 2019). Also, these statistics represent the limitations of Twitter to represent the healing rituals of people outside the primary demographic of Twitter users. In other words, one cannot expect the same exact shrines that form on Twitter to form on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram due to differences in the ages, sex/gender, and race of those who frequent each platform. Though Twitter users are predominately white and 30-49 and only about 10% of users create a significant portion of media that is circulated on Twitter, I think Twitter is the best platform to examine for this thesis because it creates a space where multiple different people can communicate with each other. Whereas other platforms such as Facebook are primarily restricted content to whoever is on a “friends” list, Twitter has a strong public presence. Tweets on Twitter are often publicly accessible since Twitter is designed to create an environment where people can converse with one another outside of their own social circles. Evidence of this is how news publications use tweets as sources of evidence. In a meeting with my mentor, Dr. Patricia Sawin, she mentioned that Twitter is a good platform to observe because many large publications such as the New York Times and Buzzfeed are beginning to use screenshots of Tweets from various twitter users (Sawin, 2020). Secondly, Twitter has an easier search function to find specific vii content. For instance, whereas other platforms such as Instagram allow users to search different users’ tags, hashtags, or captions, Twitter’s advanced search function allows a certain time frame to be selected making it easier to find relevant data. Due to the newness of social media, one can expect there would be limited research on how shrine making has manifested itself in a virtual realm. Though virtual shrine making is a relatively new process, it is still significant to study because it is representative of the grieving process in the contemporary age. As technology becomes increasingly important in society, one can expect that many of the rituals that take place in the physical world are also beginning to develop roots in the virtual one as well. As grieving rituals develop online, using digital forms of ephemera, this presents academia with the new opportunity to study how grieving rituals are adapted to exist on an online platform.

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